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The dominance of biology in driving North Atlantic oxygen trends

In recent decades, the global ocean oxygen concentration has been declining, but this decline is underestimated in numerical ocean models by as much as 50%. Several mechanisms are responsible for this deoxygenation, including solubility-driven changes in surface fluxes and biological processes. By linking changes in the different processes to those driving changes in temperature and dissolved inorganic carbon, we can determine the magnitude of each driver of oxygen change. We show that a consistent oxygen decrease in the surface ocean of the North Atlantic has been dominated by an increase in biological oxygen consumption which, at its peak, is responsible for more than 50% of the total deoxygenation. Although the direct impact of warming is lower, deoxygenation due to solubility change has trebled in the past twenty years, suggesting it will become an increasingly significant driver of ocean deoxygenation with future warming.

Our speaker

Rachel Sanders works at UKRI-BAS. For her undergraduate degree, Rachel studied maths with oceans and climate science at the University of Liverpool, with a year also working at the National Oceanography Centre in Liverpool. After that, Rachel moved to Cambridge to do a PhD with BAS and the University of Southampton, where she explored interannual variability in Southern Ocean water masses, and particularly the impact of sea ice changes on Subantarctic Mode Water. Since then, Rachel have completed two short postdocs; the first at BAS, where she investigated the causes of the 2015 North Atlantic cold anomaly within different ocean models. The second was at NORCE in Bergen, where she developed a method to quantify different processes driving deoxygenation using observations from the North Atlantic. Read more about Rachel and her work here.

What is a Climate Coffee?

#climatecoffees are short (circa 40 min: 20 min talk + 20 min Q&A), relaxed meetings for scientists to share ideas, discuss methods, and communicate new results. They are open to speakers of all seniority; we especially encourage early-career scientists to become speakers. The Coffees are an exciting opportunity for scientists to build a network and disseminate recent results peer-to-peer. We invite researchers from across the climate science community to join us for this series of regular online knowledge exchange events.

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Organisation

The Climate Coffees are organized by the Horizon Europe project OCEAN:ICE, the Danish Meteorological Institute and the European Climate Research Alliance.